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Notes from the Editor

Kids, the paperboy has thrown another fine issue of the newsletter onto your front lawn. So, run out and git it before the neighbor's yellow lab chews it up!

We start off this issue with Brad Moore's second article on the use of strings. (If you missed Brad's first article, you can read it here in NL 138.) Brad starts off with a discussion of the ASCII coding of characters (alphanumeric and otherwise), and finishes with an excellent routine which enables the programmer to check if a sequence of characters input by the user is a valid number. Nice job, Brad! Give us a bunch more articles just like that!

Next up, Alyce gives us a nice article containing tips for those programmers who aspire to write programs for release. Here are some questions that the software author needs to ask: Does the software perform properly? Does it include a help file or a user guide? What type of license should be included? Believe or not, all of these questions--and many more--have already been discussed in previous versions of the Liberty BASIC Newsletter! And Alyce's article tells you where to go to find this information. Thanks, Alyce!

Keep reading, kids, because LB programmer Grahame King scores a hat trick in this issue!

Grahame starts off by providing us with a diversion, a sliding tile game referred to as Numero in Grahame's native Australia. The game is playable by mouse because Grahame has made good use of Liberty BASIC's ability to trap mouse button events. Dig into the code of the game to find out how. And for you programmers who love nice things in small packages, the Numero game occupies only about 130 lines of code, if you remove the white spaces.

Grahame's second contribution is simple but powerful. On the surface, it appears to be only a line-drawing demo. But if you look at it closely, it also illustrates (1) subroutines for event handlers, (2) rubber band objects, and (3) setting a debug flag to inspect the contents of variables.

Grahame's third article is Precision and Scientific Notation in Liberty Basic. This is a well-written, general-purpose article discussing scientific notation, precision, accuracy, and Liberty BASIC's USING() function. Grahame also provides a couple useful functions crafted by his own hand. One function returns a number in scientific notation, while the second function is a handy rounding function. Thanks for all three contributions, Grahame!

Next, invaluable contributer and editor Janet Terra provides an informative article called A Graphicbox With Scrollbars. Programmers, you can not only turn scrollbars on and off, but you can control the range through which a scrollbar will scroll the window. Janet provides no fewer than 6 demo programs, including a comprehensive demo at the end of the article which shows how to control scrolling via API calls. Excellent job, Janet, on an LB feature that hasn't been given much attention.

Last and least, Nally reveals more of the capabilities of Wire, which is the friendly name for the Liberty BASIC Wire Frame Library. In the current article, he discusses the RequestObjectName function. This function makes it possible for a user to select a wire model object by clicking on the object in the graphicbox. For readers who are new to Wire, the article also provides links to the four previous articles about this graphics library.

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Well, sorry to end so abruptly campers! But Ethel said that if I painted a big number "24" in her NASCAR room, she would make me some turkey gumbo!. Well, I guess that's a fair exchange. But I don't mind admitting that I feel like I'm competing with that pretty-boy, Jeff Gordon!

Liberty BASIC Newsletter 139 is now secure. Nally out.

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